Steve Bannon addresses a crowd of Roy Moore supporters at a rally in Midland City, December 11, 2017.

By Audra Melton/The New York Times/Redux.

The Breitbart Embassy is closed.

If anything symbolized the end of an era for the scrappy, youthful crew of Breitbart News, it was the loss of Steve Bannon’s grand Capitol Hill town house. Once the de facto headquarters of Breitbart’s legendary ragers, it had more recently become the decorous nerve center for Bannon’s attempt to do the D.C. power-player thing—fete Washingtonians with Dean & DeLuca canapes and hold them captive with his megalomania. But when Bannon stepped down from Breitbart earlier this week after he seemed unable to outrun the comments he had made about Donald Trump Jr., among other things, in Michael Wolff’s book, he took its D.C. office in the divorce.

Breitbart’s young writers and editors weren’t too fazed. They are, after all, a digital-savvy nomadic bunch, a group used to churning out copy regularly from wherever they can park a laptop and get a Wi-Fi signal. Many hadn’t even used the Embassy in a while. But there was something symbolic about having an office near the beating heart of power, where reporters huddled around a giant table, grinding away on their laptops, hoping to foment a political revolution. And then the heart of Breitbart disappeared.

In the hours after the news broke of Bannon’s firing, the leadership of the site—including co-founder Larry Solov and editor-in-chief Alex Marlow—quickly instituted omertà, telling the writers not to talk to journalists outside the company. And with good reason: Breitbart needed to regroup. Bannon had become the face of the brand, to the point that the rest of the world could barely differentiate between him and the site itself. With Bannon gone, so was the site’s mission, in many people’s eyes. The leaders of several conservative publications told Politico that Bannon’s agenda had slowly eaten away at the late Andrew Breitbart’s fire-breathing conservative legacy over the years, leaving the site adrift. Everyone from Matt Drudge to Trump Jr. has called for the site to return to its roots and continue fighting the familiar culture wars of 2012-era America. And several figures in the Cult of Andrew agreed. “You can’t be a leader if it’s all about you. Andrew, he took care of people,” said Kurt Schlicter, a Breitbart acolyte who left the site over a falling-out with Bannon. “He would sit at a bar with a guy with a blog with five readers and talk to him for hours about it. You think Steve Bannon would let a guy with five blog followers in the same room with him?” (Representatives for Breitbart and Bannon did not respond to requests for comment.)

But restoring Breitbart to its insurgent roots is easier said than done. To start with, it’s hard to wage an insurgency when the insurgents’ candidate is in the Oval Office. And though Bannon’s political aspirations certainly affected the site, he and Andrew Breitbart were much more similar than some are now suggesting: charismatic bomb-throwers, giving zero fucks, aggrieving liberal snowflakes with a steady diet of stories on black crime and Muslim interlopers. The current generation, in comparison, occasionally seems lost as it tries to reason through its position in a world with Trump in the White House and its leaders gone. Breitbart now consists of a suite of rented offices in Los Angeles, a Slack channel, and several dozen slightly bewildered millennials with the expectations of the far right weighing heavily on them.

After Andrew Breitbart died, lower-level employees immediately grabbed for better titles and more power. This time around, though, anyone looking for a right-wing Game of Thrones power struggle will leave sorely disappointed. After Bannon’s ouster, it became instantly clear that Marlow was in charge. His ascendancy post-Bannon was essentially secured after Matt Drudge published a tweet calling Marlow, Andrew Breitbart’s first hire, his intellectual heir. “[It’s a] 99 percent surety that Marlow consolidates power,” said a source close to the company. Solov, a low-key Californian averse to confrontation, would continue to run operations. Considering the personalities within Breitbart, that’s a smooth transition: despite his outsize Hill reputation as a loose cannon unnervingly loyal to Bannon, multiple sources in the company told me that political editor Matt Boyle was uninterested in making power plays, preferring to continue chasing cucks down the halls of Washington than providing a grand strategic direction for a site dedicated to tearing down liberal culture.

And that, says the right-wing consensus, is the problem. No one would confuse the 31-year-old Marlow, generally respected in the community and within Breitbart, with Bannon, who had more enemies on the right than journalist supplicants in the mainstream media. “I thought Alex was a decent human being who was smart,” said Kurt Bardella, the site’s former spokesman, who had worked with Marlow and Solov for years. “He felt that he had a responsibility to the memory of Andrew to be there and guide the site, and had a lot of heartburn over the way that Steve really hijacked Breitbart.” That takeover included the leadership, too: numerous current and former employees told me that Bannon, whom Bardella described as a “dictatorial bully,” ran roughshod over Marlow and Solov during meetings, overruling their journalistic decisions through pure rage. Over the years, the two Breitbart veterans essentially gave up on pushing back. “[Marlow] was just beat down to where there was no point fighting with Steve because it’s never going to go anywhere,” said Bardella. “I think he just gave up, which, frankly, I think anyone in that position would do.” (Only two other entities seemed to be able overrule Bannon at any given time: __Rebekah Mercer,__long under the sway of her political guru, and Susie Breitbart, Andrew’s widow, widely considered an enigma in the company.)

Marlow won’t take over Bannon’s title as executive chairman, and it’s unclear if there will ever be another executive chairman. As fundamentally decent as Marlow may be, he lacks the magnetic, charismatic personality that defined both Bannon and Andrew and essentially ensured that their employees—mostly hired fresh out of college and now in their late 20s and early 30s—could hardly step up. Unlike the media outlets it hoped to compete against, which tend to promote individual writers and personalities, it’s hard for anyone outside Breitbart’s core audience to name a single reporter for the site. ”As much as [Bannon critic] Ben Shapiro can complain about this and that and Steve mucking up Andrew’s legacy—which he totally did—he did it with Susie’s permission and with Larry’s permission, so there’s something to be said about that,” the source continued. “No one stood up. It’s like a trickle: if everyone would have rushed the gate, Steve would have backed down . . . Instead, one person at a time took on Steve, and they lost.”

The last time Marlow had full control of the site, after Bannon left for the White House, Breitbart began moving in a confused new direction: it would be a journalistic outlet, staffed with real journalists from mainstream publications, which would do real investigative reporting. Traffic slipped over a period of months. At the time, former Breitbart employees with an ax to grind complained that Marlow lacked Bannon and Breitbart’s magic touch. But a source within the company disputed that it was Marlow’s fault. “When Steve was in the White House, at any point in time, on any day of the week, he could have quit and said, ‘I’m back, let’s get back to my vision.’ Now there’s no chance of that, and that gives Alex a bit more freedom.” Without the specter of Bannon lurking over Marlow’s shoulder, the source continued, “I think that’ll make us a lot more comfortable with that [freedom], and in him.”

Several issues will likely determine the site’s longterm survival, according to people familiar with the inner workings of the company, starting with its SiriusXM radio show, a key tool for reaching beyond its online fan base. Bannon had initially hosted the show, but now the duties may fall to a less recognizable talent, like Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam, a frequent host himself with a strong fan base, who nevertheless lacks the name-brand popularity of his former boss. (Several people indicated that Kassam’s British accent may also be an impediment in hosting a red-meat, pro-Trump show.) Breitbart’s future also depends on whether the site can move beyond its roots as the right-wing’s greatest aggregation machine, packaged with Marlow’s inspired and incendiary and Drudge-ready headlines, and actually begin to do serious journalism. Or maybe serious journalism isn’t what Breitbart readers want, and the site will merely chug along on the traffic bestowed by those Drudge Report links. The Mercer money may be secure, given that Rebekah went out of her way to oust Bannon and protect the company. But the revenue stream, dented by an advertising exodus, will keep the future in doubt.

And then there is the challenge of meeting the expectations of the Cult of Andrew, which is especially severe since it’s unclear what the charismatic founder’s vision would have looked like in a more cynical, jaded 2018, with conservatives in power but failing miserably. Meanwhile, the Cult of Bannon within the company, a much smaller crew, has remained largely silent, with the hope that one day Bannon will be vindicated. The biggest challenge, of course, is that the guard has changed, passing from two dramatically aggrieved baby boomers more in touch with the Trump base to a group of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings hoping to find their way, never having been led without a monster at the helm. They may hit hard above their weight, and they may eventually have a confident leader in charge. But it may not matter whether Marlow takes the site in a more earnest direction, or whether it defaults to aping Steve or Andrew: Breitbart will probably not be fully re-energized until there’s a Democrat in the Oval Office.